We are the combination of four hospitals: the General Hospital, the Children’s Hospital, the Women’s Hospital and the Traumatology, Rehabilitation and Burns Hospital. We are part of the Vall d’Hebron Barcelona Hospital Campus: a world-leading health park where healthcare plays a crucial role.
Patients are the centre and the core of our system. We are professionals committed to quality care and our organizational structure breaks down the traditional boundaries between departments and professional groups, with an exclusive model of knowledge areas.
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The commitment of Vall d'Hebron University Hospital to innovation allows us to be at the forefront of medicine, providing first class care adapted to the changing needs of each patient.
The Geriatrics Service of the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital offers comprehensive, cross-disciplinary, and person-centered care to address the challenges associated with aging, frailty, and clinical complexity.
The Geriatrics Service of the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital is a newly created service, established in April 2024, born with the aim of responding to the new care challenges arising from population ageing and increasing clinical complexity.
Our mission is to provide comprehensive, personalized care focused on older adults and patients with advanced diseases, prioritizing quality of life, functionality, autonomy, and shared decision-making.
We are a service committed to close, humane, and evidence-based medicine, working in coordination with the rest of the hospital services, primary care, and the different healthcare resources in the territory.
We practice modern geriatrics, which goes far beyond care exclusively linked to advanced age and is specialized in addressing frailty, vulnerability, and clinical complexity.
Our care model focuses on preserving people’s functionality, cognition, autonomy, and quality of life, incorporating their values, preferences, and individual goals through shared decision-making processes.
We work with a proactive and comprehensive approach, aimed at preventing complications before they arise, through early detection of frailty, early mobilization, prevention of iatrogenesis, and advance care planning.
We also understand coordination between levels of care, network-based work within the community, and attention to care transitions as a fundamental part of treatment, always from a cross-cutting, integrated perspective focused on each person’s needs.
The Geriatrics Service offers comprehensive, cross-cutting, and multidisciplinary care aimed at older adults, with special attention to frail, complex individuals or those with palliative needs. Its activity includes hospital care, specialized consultations, emergency support, community-based work, and close coordination with primary care, with the aim of improving the quality of care and continuity of care.
The care model is based on comprehensive geriatric assessment, coordination and integration of care across the different levels of care in the region, and person-centered care focused on quality of life.
Acute Geriatric Unit (AGU): specialized care for older patients with acute medical conditions and high clinical vulnerability, with a multidisciplinary approach and functional orientation.
Hospital Unit for Frail Elderly Patients (HUFE): acute geriatric unit focused on frail patients with acute illness and functional recovery needs, in coordination with Sant Rafael Hospital.
Orthogeriatrics: joint care with surgical services for older patients with fragility fractures.
Multidisciplinary hospital support team: early detection and intervention in hospitalized older patients at risk of functional decline, delirium syndrome, or functional loss associated with admission. Assessment and management of patients requiring referral to intermediate care hospitals.
Hospital interconsultations: comprehensive geriatric assessment of hospitalized older patients with frailty, delirium, polypharmacy, clinical complexity, or palliative needs. Collaboration with different services to adjust the level of therapeutic intensity and ensure territorial coordination.
Emergency and inpatient care: comprehensive palliative care focused on symptom control, comfort, emotional support, and shared decision-making planning.
Outpatient non-oncological palliative care consultations: specialized care for patients with advanced heart failure, pulmonary fibrosis, and other advanced chronic diseases requiring palliative care.
General geriatrics: comprehensive assessment, clinical control, and follow-up of older patients with frailty, falls, functional or cognitive decline, polypharmacy, and clinical complexity.
Cardiogeriatrics: geriatric assessment of patients eligible for complex cardiac procedures, especially TAVI.
Onco-hematogeriatrics: shared approach with Oncology and Hematology to adapt treatments to the functional and overall condition of the older patient, and to provide follow-up during the onco-hematological process.
Integrated Complexity Support Team: shared model with Primary Care for the treatment, follow-up, and coordination of complex and vulnerable patients.
Coordination with Primary Care: single two-way communication channel with primary care teams to facilitate consultations, shared follow-up, and continuity of care.
The Geriatrics Service maintains a strong commitment to teaching and the training of future healthcare professionals.
As part of a university hospital, we actively participate in the training of undergraduate students from different healthcare disciplines, with service professionals involved in university teaching activities. Our aim is to bring students closer to the complexity and particularities of caring for older adults, especially those with frailty, vulnerability, or high clinical complexity.
We understand teaching not only as the transmission of medical knowledge, but also as an opportunity to promote a person-centred approach to care, based on scientific evidence, but also on closeness, listening, respect, and shared decision-making. We aim to convey a modern vision of geriatrics and to help spark interest in a transversal, human, and essential specialty for the future of healthcare systems.
The service also participates in the specialized healthcare training of geriatric internal medicine residents (MIR). We currently have one MIR position per year, which allows us to offer very close and individualized training, fostering the integration of residents within the care, teaching, and research team from the beginning of their residency.
The Geriatrics Service maintains a strong commitment to research, innovation, and ongoing training.
Although it is a recently established service, several professionals on the team are researchers in the Aging, Frailty and Transitions (ReFiTBCN) research group affiliated with VHIR. Doctoral theses are being developed, and research lines are being pursued in areas related to frailty, delirium, clinical complexity, sarcopenia, onco-hematogeriatrics, palliative care, polypharmacy, and integrated care models.
The service’s aim is to progressively consolidate its own research activity oriented toward generating knowledge and improving the care of older, vulnerable, and/or complex patients.
Research into Ageing, Frailty and Transitions in Barcelona
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